Daniel Boone and not Daniel Webster

Sometimes there's a fine line between summary and plagarism.

And other times, the line becomes the only thing you can see.

In fact, the line is sometimes so glaringly obvious, it is annoying. For example: you are taught as a student writer to follow an idea that is not your own with an appropriate parenthetical note. It is only right, we are told, to give credit where credit is due. So we employ various parentheses, dates, numbers, semicolons, italicized phrases, underlined words, quotation marks, and foreign names that shock a reader out of his or her rhythm of comprehension, drawing their attention away to the fact that we're saying something that somebody else has already said (and probably said better that we did!).

The more parenthetical documentation in a paper, the more obvious it becomes that the author is simply gathering information and vomiting it (neatly and sanitarily organized, of course) for your reading (dis)pleasure. By the end of the paper, the author gets an "A" for proper form, but an "F" for originality. All that the author is really saying is that he or she is really good at being a proper copycat.

Like Daniel Webster, the author has simply surveyed what people were saying, determined what it meant, and organized it onto paper. And there it is, accurate as a rifle, but sterile as a hospital room.

I think that's what we do as a church sometimes. We become really good copycats of other churches. We get their sermon series, we employ their fonts in our slides, we take from their websites, we use their philosophies, we adopt their missions, we go to their conferences, and we join their alliances.

Of course, we're not "proper" copycats, because most of the time our congregants, deacons, and elders (or even our staff members!) do not know that we are copying when we are copying. But copycats we are, nonetheless.

And now I must answer the obvious challenge: What is so wrong with being a copycat?

If something at another church is working "for the kingdom," why not "make it our own" in our own context? I mean, don't we have a responsibilty as leaders to keep ourselves familiar with the current trends, so as to stay relevant, keep moving, and keep growing like other churches are growing? We don't want to have to suffer the same setbacks that other churches have, so why not go to their conferences, listen to what they've tried, find out about what has failed, and do at our church what is working for theirs?

Because it just plain is not that easy.

Oh... and those churches didn't copy their way to "the top."

Those churches were Daniel Boones... not Daniel Websters.

Instead of finding out what God is doing there, let's find out what God is uniquely doing here. Let's start asking God, his word, ourselves, and each other:

What is the kingdom of God?

How has God uniquely extended his kingdom in and through our church in the past?

How is God extending his kingdom uniquely in each of our lives?

How is God wanting to use each of us to extend his kingdom over the lives of each other?

How does God seem to be extending his kingdom already in our midst, apart from our initiative?

Where in our community is God leading us? To whom? Would our city even know if we no longer were here? Would our presence be missed?

Once we have answered (and commit ourselves to continuing to answer) these questions, then and only then should we go looking at what God is doing somewhere else. If we don't first answer the questions about our own home, then our home will simply become a hodge podge of what everyone else's home looks like--neatly organized, of course... but sterile.

Let's be Daniel Boones before we are Daniel Websters. Let's recover the excitement and adventure of blazing a trail with God where he has us, lest we simply become articulators of where others have gone.